Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
Different cards require different skillsets, chalice players need to build a deck that can actually win without playing 1 drops. They also need to play well to win matchups Chalice is bad. Obviously there are tough brainstorms but it's not always 'super skill intensive and im smarter than non-blue players'. There are times you just resolve ancestral recall that also turns a 6 mana uncastable brick into a 1 mana Hallowed Burial, or puts back 2 lands to get hellbent for infernal tutor.
My dad can play Magic with more difficulty than your dad...
Maverik... I am talking about decks that actually try to win in a non-kitchentable meta
Also cantrip timing is totally unimporant... yeah sure...
Yeah because you actually build your deck from scratch each time... Most chalice decks are 90+% fixed like most other decks, where is the skill in copying a sucessful list?
ok sometimes bs does that, sometime you keep 1-landers with 2 brainstorms and lock yourself after turn 2 and just loose... what purpose do these "examples" it proves nothing
Maybe its time you step off your pedestal, do you really think that MB BUG is harder to play then MB Maverick / Elves?
Resolving one threath and protecting it with spells is not that hard to play out compared to a deck that has a ton of activations.
Don't act like cantripping is uber pro, you look at the board state, you know you have X cards that affect the board state in a favourable way for you so you dig towards them and thats it.
Decks I own: 2x DnTx [B,G,R], Deadguy Ale, Maverick, Elves, Enchantress [WG/GU], Goblins, (Shardless) BUG, Food Chain, Aluren, High tide (reset/spiral), UR delver, RUG delver, Grixis Delver, Reanimator, Lands, Dark Depths (turbo / selesnya / hoogaak)
Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. A.E. (1879 - 1955)
The most difficult decks to play I have personally found are those with both a direct goal and Tutors. What I mean by that is a deck like TES, Elves or Lands have a very dedicated and streamlined endpoint, but these deck tend to have a simple way to stop them. So you have to know how to play against the whole format, not just against a given opponent.
The tutors magnify the difficulty. While they offer solutions to issues, they also offer potential answers to yet asked questions. Looking for the wrong thing without the safety net of filtering for more answers is often a win or lose choice. That might be the only tutor you see all game and knowing the format, if you should push you goal or seek a a pre-emptive response to a known issue is hard. (The reason I include TES is because a lot of these targets are not in your main, so it feels much the same at times.)
There is a skill to any deck, honed over years of testing and trial. If you need proof go watch Sully on his "Best of SCG Live" video. A master-class in how to play burn. Some though are far easier than others. U/R Delver is not a complex deck to play, nor is B/R Reanimator. But that doesn't mean that there are not lines that have been long mastered by others I would never see.
Personally, I think the hardest deck to play optimally in Legacy is Elves.
I am not sure why there is a debate about skill in cards or deck, as this has nothing to do with the B/R list.
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Well that's an interesting point. I think you could easy see tutors as super-cantrips, because while a cantrip might find what you need, a tutor can be any card in your deck. So they give even more options than cantrips in a way. I think you could argue that GSZ/Infernal/Gamble are actually more powerful in those shells than cantrips actually. WHich is ok, because they have more constraints on deckbuilding.
But honestly, arguing that Elves or Lands is actually less consistent (which is the main argument here atm for their overpoweredness) than any blue deck is a bit of a stretch in my imagination
Super cantrips I can get behind. More options though I am not sure I completely agree with. You get a single look for a single target, but you do not often get to repeat the act many times in a game looking for new answers to changing situations or filtering out bad draws.
While a card like GSZ gives you access to silver bullets it doesn't save you from mana flood, it doesn't save you from finding the wrong half of your deck or missing land drops. I think that the conditions placed on tutors make them individually extremely strong in the right shell yet they are still often less efficient over a long period than small but consistent looks at smaller numbers of changing cards.
The problem is that your very limited by the tutors you pick. No tutor in Legacy is unconditional. GSZ is target limited, Gamble will just rip out your heart sometimes, Infernal is dependent on a deck structure that is streamlined to knife-edge. I feel like "Consistency" is a red hearing. Your limited by your chosen tutor to do more or less one thing so you make sure you do it well. But when the only limiting factor to playing Xerox is that you play Blue it makes those tutors conditional aspects even more apparent.
So while Elves is very good at what it does and goes crazy if left undisturbed, due to the limitations placed upon it by its tutors it can not run the kinds of interaction other decks can. While it's finely turned to do something the same way every time and quickly, it's never going to have the extra flexibility of a deck like Grixis or BUG, with Burn or Discard main to grant additional interaction. Thus loses consistency to a deck that has more space available for more interactive effects while also having the ability to consistently locate them.
Hold the phone, apparently CotV needs BANNED!!! SCG Legacy Classic had 119 people, and there were 13 Chalices in the top 8, count'em 13! Screw this ban brainstorm talk, can't play my brainstorm with this many CotV coming to town.
Source
Yeah, I've said it before, the format is binary, you play prison/taxing with chalice or similar (thalia) or you play brainstorm, or you lose.
Between the Open and the Classic, that's alot of non-blue decks. In fact, those are some diverse Top 8's. I'm gonna quote myself here...
Ignore the bit about Brainstorm. The last two paragraphs are the emphasis here. Legacy looks to be in a great place right now.
#bantarmogoyf
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